So, the main twist... [OBVIOUS SPOILERS]

[Art Cop]

Is there any in-universe explanation for us experiencing the timeline the way we originally had, or does the idea of The True Flowchart boil down to making the way the story is told more complex just for the sake of making it more complex without any further consequences for the plot? Intertwining red-blue timelines produce X symbols, which, I believe, should point towards the whole Tokkiko business. However, in the divergence chapter, she doesn't make any comments regarding this issue, nor does she even explain the mechanism behind her suicide. She simply says something along the lines of "hahaha, I NIRVANA'D, further explanations are unnecessary lol". Well, I guess this could be accepted, but such a resolution seems somewhat inconsistent for Uchikoshi, who has always integrated all the meta-stuff into the main story rather meticulously in his previous works.

[Bluumberry]

Yeah, this bugged me a bit as well. My mind kept comparing it to (spoilers for Zero Escape series) ZTD because there the flow chart not being correct was made to mislead the player, but it also was something the characters figured out as you went far enough along. If we didn't have that section with Mama, we'd be left with only the tiny hints you get during the playthrough AND the characters obviously don't even know about it.

[OneStrangePerson]

Originally posted by Bluumberry:

If we didn't have that section with Mama, we'd be left with only the tiny hints you get during the playthrough AND the characters obviously don't even know about it.

That's the thing - the characters themselves knew exactly what happened in which time period. Ryuki said clearly that he psynced with Amame "yesterday", so he knew it was the present. Only we, player, thought that it was six years ago. So the whole flowchart was misleading only for us.
As to why that is... I don't think if game specified it anywhere, but I personally think that this is another step for canonising player's interferance with the game world and it's characters. Maybe we are the one who make this flowchart as we watch them.
Honestly, the more I think about all this, the more I suspect that "nil ending" may actually be the final canon ending and AI3 will start from there.

[Bluumberry]

Originally posted by OneStrangePerson:

That's the thing - the characters themselves knew exactly what happened in which time period. Ryuki said clearly that he psynced with Amame "yesterday", so he knew it was the present. Only we, player, thought that it was six years ago. So the whole flowchart was misleading only for us.

Exactly. One of my earliest moments of questioning the actual timeline was when Shoma was talking about just seeing his dad and buying him the bowtie "last year" when Komeji was supposed to be dead at that point.
The point is that it feels forced when it's only a gimmick made to confuse the player instead of something that makes sense in the context of the story. Why does Bibi go around dressed up like Mizuki will 6 years in the future when she does her investigation in the past timeline? Answer: just to fool the player.
When the reason for something is just to confuse the player, it becomes less believable and less...for lack of a better word to describe it: "cool".

[OneStrangePerson]

Originally posted by Bluumberry:

When the reason for something is just to confuse the player, it becomes less believable and less...for lack of a better word to describe it: "cool".

I agree that if all this twist with "timeline being wrong" was made just to confuse player and surprise him later, then it could be called a cheap trick. But if "just fooling the player" part was done intentionally to play into something else, when I would say it is clever.
And if I remember correctly Uchikoshi very rarely write things in his works that didn't connect with anything and didn't mean anything.

[Art Cop]

Originally posted by Bluumberry:

Exactly. One of my earliest moments of questioning the actual timeline was when Shoma was talking about just seeing his dad and buying him the bowtie "last year" when Komeji was supposed to be dead at that point.

Yeah, it was at exactly the same point for me! At the time I thought that these subtle inconsistencies were due to the narrative structure starting to bug out or whatever (which could've been a consequence of Nirvana Initiative starting to take place), and thought that breaking the way the story is perceived would've been a great technique for tapping into all the themes which had accumulated up to that point. Unfortunately, the game didn't decide to make the story gradually break down, and instead went with "story itself is perfectly consistent, it's just that we decided to tell it in a confusing way for no apparent reason than to make it more confusing". Which is a shame, since before the scene with Mama the narrative had all the devices to produce a twist of a former kind, and it would've been a rather uncharted territory for Uchikoshi (because we've already seen all the other Flowchart-ish Timeline-ish Multiverse-ish Player-Is-A-Part-Of-The-Plot-ish meta-stuff in Ever17 and Zero Escape in one way or another)

[AngelDormante]

Originally posted by Art Cop:

Originally posted by Bluumberry:

Exactly. One of my earliest moments of questioning the actual timeline was when Shoma was talking about just seeing his dad and buying him the bowtie "last year" when Komeji was supposed to be dead at that point.

Yeah, it was at exactly the same point for me!

I didn't exactly put together the timeline being swapped until the scene with Mama, but I was noticing these little consistencies too, and I remember the big moment where I thought something was definitely off with the characters even if I hadn't figured out the timeline thing.

There was that scene in the past when Date showed up and shot Tearer after Ryuki incapacitated Bibi. Since we were still supposed to think she was present-day Mizuki at the time, we thought Date was missing at this point, but they both barely had any reaction to each other (and Date had the stronger one for obvious reasons). That was weird but dismissable on its own, until I got to see how strongly actual present-day Mizuki reacted to Date suddenly reappearing. Bibi had no reason to go off on Date, Mizuki did. That part clicking was probably the coolest part of realizing the timeline twist.

[MeldinX2]

Originally posted by AngelDormante:

Originally posted by Art Cop:

Yeah, it was at exactly the same point for me!

I didn't exactly put together the timeline being swapped until the scene with Mama, but I was noticing these little consistencies too, and I remember the big moment where I thought something was definitely off with the characters even if I hadn't figured out the timeline thing.

There was that scene in the past when Date showed up and shot Tearer after Ryuki incapacitated Bibi. Since we were still supposed to think she was present-day Mizuki at the time, we thought Date was missing at this point, but they both barely had any reaction to each other (and Date had the stronger one for obvious reasons). That was weird but dismissable on its own, until I got to see how strongly actual present-day Mizuki reacted to Date suddenly reappearing. Bibi had no reason to go off on Date, Mizuki did. That part clicking was probably the coolest part of realizing the timeline twist.

True but what i did not really like is how they fooled you. Since they dress exactly the same, Use the same exact hairstyle, Use the same motorcycle ect. which they only do because they want to fool the player.

[⎝⧹autarch⧸⎠]

Originally posted by MeldinX2:

which they only do because they want to fool the player.

I think the word that exactly describes my feeling is 'contrived':
'Deliberately created rather than arising naturally or spontaneously.
Created or arranged in a way that seems artificial and unrealistic.
example: "the ending of the novel is too pat and contrived"'

or in this case, "the beginning of the game was too pat and contrived"

It reminds me of what I read about Uchikoshi's writing method, he usually manages to pull it off, but maybe not in the case of Bibi inexplicably copying Mizuki, and lol he didn't even try explaining how Ryuki survived after being lethally shot:

"Uchikoshi first writes the basic outline of a story. With plot twist heavy stories, he will typically work on the ending first and continue backwards, in order to not get confused when writing the plot. This method of writing, referred to by Uchikoshi as the "deductive composition method", was not used in his earlier works; Ever 17: The Out of Infinity was written using the "inductive composition method", where a setting is created first, and a story is created to support the setting, something he described as a gamble, with the risk of an uninteresting story."

[YdenMkII]

My guess is the whole idea is just a rehash of the Ever 17 plot. The gist of Ever 17 is that you choose one of 2 protags to play the game with and you view the events based on each protag's point of view. Like this game the point of view actually happen in 2 different time periods designed to fool the player because the player is a higher dimension being that doesn't view events in chronological order.

This leads to the twist of the player in the role of Blick Winkel, that game's version of Frayer, using their knowledge of the 2 timelines to create a true one. The goal being the characters in the game are trying to fool the higher dimension being to break the rules of the world for their own ends similar to how Tokiko is trying to break the rules of the simulation by confusing the Frayer.

[Alexios]

You are correct. It's just for the sake of being complex... as of now. We might get more info in the next games since even the ARG stuff of the first game which were not so important there is now more relevant here.